Tom Zummer

TERRA COGNITA:
ROBOT DRAWINGS BY TOM ZUMMER

Sept. 20-22 | Studio 107 ( 411 Brazos St. #107)

Reception: Sept. 20 | 5-7pm | Studio 107

Thomas Zummer wittily examines the ways that media technologies such as photography, film, electrostatic copying and digitization have elbowed themselves between perception and reference. For example, one hauntingly abstracted graphite-and-carbon work is a hand-drawn rendering of a photocopy of a fragment of a photograph that depicts a dense multitude of people. This drawing summons up two kinds of memories: of actual anonymous crowds and of the countless media representatoins of heaving masses of humanity.

With the real life sources of the images at so many representational removes, we become acutely sensitive to the “noise” introduced by the intervention of different mediums. Zummer’s appreciation of the vibrant imprecision of current imaging technologies as they endlessly circulate bits and pieces of reality produces a richly contradictory sense of loss. His drawings awaken a nostalgia less for the object of reference than for what such objects once made us feel. One drawing of a detail of a printed reproduction of a photograph centers on a repeated pattern of aerial bombs caught as they drop through the air. For us, such formally composed bombs can only explode aesthetically, yet we are uncomfortably aware that they really did land on other heads.
Zummer’s drawings are exquisite commentaries on the mass media’s ambition to restructure our vision by reproducing anything we might possibly want to see. They are also visually seductive and uncannily beautful. In one ghostly drawing of a blown-up photocopy of a lightbulb, the copy machine’s flash of blinding light has conjured a strange but still recognizable form out of total darkness. The lightbulb glows like a miraculous icon against the drawing’s burnished carbon background. With this ensemble, Zummer confirms that the expansion of vision vouchsafed by technological mediums has no doubt permanently altered our apprehension of what we once regarded as real. – Ernest Larson